Top 6 Ways to Boost Your Local SEO

The local SEO strategy is based on marketing your products and services to local leads and customers. It puts your business in front of your target audience and helps you to maximize traffic and sales for your business. 

Optimizing your website for local SEO is essential since 46% of all searches on Google are based on local searches, like “near me.” And 28% of these local searches end up in an actual purchase.

So in this post, I’ll show you 6 ways to boost your local SEO and get customers to find your local stores and services. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s first look at what local SEO is.

What Is Local SEO?

Optimizing your site for local SEO is a way to help you compete against more prominent national brands with unlimited resources to spend. It’s a strategy to get more website traffic, leads, and sales based on targeting customers in a specific location.

For instance, business owners with brick-and-mortar stores or who offer services in a specific area use the internet to promote their businesses and reach their local audience. And with the help of local SEO, they can get their companies to rank in local search when someone is searching for a store or service “near me.” 

That said, let’s dive in.

1. Use Keywords That Focus on Location

Before any optimization work, you need to perform keyword research to see if there’s enough search volume for the keywords you want to target. And to easily do this, you can use keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Google Keyword Planner. 

When optimizing for local SEO, you’ll want to use location-specific keywords. For example, if you have a Thai food restaurant located in Davie, Florida, you’d want to use a target keyword like “Thai restaurants in Davie, Florida.” Then, make sure to include this target keyword when optimizing your meta tags and creating your content.

In addition, it’s also vital that you list your business on Google if you want your site to show up in local search, which we’re going to look at next.

2. Create a Google My Business Listing

In the next step, I recommend creating a Google My Business listing. Business Profiles on Google are specific to businesses that serve customers at a particular location or within a designated service area.

That being the case, optimizing your Google My Business listing is one of the most effective ways to improve your rankings on Google Maps and gain visibility in Google’s local search results. 

Once you’ve filled in the requested information in your Google My Business account, the information is added to your Business Profile, which then appears in Google’s local search results, the Google Knowledge Panel, and Google Maps.

Don’t forget to include all essential information about your company, such as your business hours, phone number, and address. Also, add your business logo and images to make your listing look more professional, plus encourage customers to leave you reviews. 

3. Submit Your Site to Yelp and Other Local Directories

Submitting your website to Yelp can help your business get more glowing reviews and local customers. 

In fact, Yelp is still one of the most popular business review sites. It connects people with local businesses by publishing reviews and information from its users. 

In 2020, Yelp averaged over 178 million unique visitors every month on its mobile, desktop, and app versions. For this reason, you should take advantage and tap into that traffic as well.

Also, getting listed on Bing can help you get more website traffic and leads for your business. And don’t forget about your social media profiles, which count as local business directories as well. 

4. Develop a Social Media Strategy 

There’s a connection between your social media profiles and rankings in search engines that’s still underutilized. 

For instance, did you know that social profiles often show up on the first page on Google when people are searching for businesses? Also, more and more people tend to use social media to research a company before purchasing.

What’s even better is the fact that the reviews you’ve managed to get on your social media will show up alongside your business name in Google search. Not only does this look professional, but prospects love to see what other customers think about your products or services. That way, showcasing good reviews will increase the likelihood of buying from you.

So, start with identifying social media sites that are popular with your target audience and get your business on these. But don’t create too many social media accounts and risk not being able to manage them all. Instead, only choose those that are relevant to your business.  

More importantly, assign someone to monitor your social media sites daily and that’s also responsible for posting new content, answering comments and reviews. You’ll want to engage with your customers and build a lasting relationship with them. 

And don’t forget to leverage and share user-generated content. UGC or user-generated content is content that’s been created by your users, fans, or followers. It’s basically free marketing and great for boosting referral traffic, click-through rate, and conversions. 

5. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Did you know that 30% of searches are made on a smartphone? Today, your website has to be mobile-friendly to be able to compete for rankings in search engines.

Google has even stated that if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it won’t rank in mobile search at all. Oops! You better optimize your website for mobile if you want to show up in the search results on Google. The same goes for all popular search engines.

Not only that but ranking your website on Google’s first page will significantly boost conversions. In fact, the first organic listing on mobile receives 27.7% of clicks, versus 19.3% on desktop. That means more sales for your business.

When optimizing your website for mobile, you should put focus on the user experience, including:

• Ensuring that your website loads quickly (preferably under 2 seconds)  
• Using bigger fonts that are easy to read
• Having a clear and straightforward design that doesn’t need zooming 
• Using proper formatting that fits mobile
• Compressing heavy images and use lazy loading
• Using a cache plugin 

There are more advanced things you can do if you want to ensure a mobile-friendly website, but these are relatively simple tasks to start with. 

6. Optimize Your Site for Voice Search

Did you know that 45 million people use voice assistants daily? More so, Google Assistant usage has increased by 400% in the last year. 

More and more people like to talk into their smartphones instead of performing a Google search each time they want to find information about a business or service. 

What’s really great if you have a local store is that mobile voice searches are 3x more likely to be based on a specific location. That’s something to consider when optimizing your website.

Optimizing for voice search doesn’t have to be a complicated process. Simply focus on understanding what your customers will likely say, instead of type, and choose the right keywords based on that. 

Often, they’ll use long-tail keywords to describe what they’re looking for. As well as starting the search with: who, what, when, where, why, and how. 

Considering this, together with using a conversational tone when publishing content on your site, will improve your rankings in voice search.

Wrapping Up

Google frequently changes its search algorithms, so it’s vital to stay on top of local SEO. But if you implement these 6 ways to boost your local SEO, you’ll have a solid foundation when Google introduces new SEO features and can easily adjust.